


Guests and Ghosts

by TurtleTotem



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Love, M/M, Photographs, Rogue/Erik if you want to see it that way, since apparently that happens in canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 09:45:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/835517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TurtleTotem/pseuds/TurtleTotem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rogue doesn't want Magneto's personality rattling around in her head. Charles sympathizes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guests and Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://we-are-not-who-we-are.tumblr.com/post/50974932752/guys-i-dont-want-to-cry-cherik-here-but-i-was) comic page.
> 
> Set shortly after the first X-Men movie.

A month after Liberty Island, Rogue is still having trouble with the people in her head.

Logan ain't a problem; it's comforting to still have him close, in a way, with the real Logan off chasing his past or whatever. His growling around in her head is like the weight of his dogtags, a reminder and a promise and a friend. Cody don't bother her anymore either; she'd been scared to death of him, not so long ago, when she thought she'd sucked out her boyfriend's soul, that she was carrying his ghost. But the real Cody is awake again now, back in Mississippi, and her copy of him has almost faded away. Compared to everything else, he hardly seems to matter now.

But then there's Magneto.

Erik Lehnsherr, Shoah survivor. Protector of mutantkind. Genius and warrior, terrorist and murderer _and stuck in her head._

He would have killed her. Very nearly did. She knows now that it bothered him more than he'd let on, but not enough to keep him from doing it. The greater good, ends and means, making the hard decisions – these are things Erik thinks about a lot. She knows he really wants, in his own way, to do the right thing. She can't help knowing. And she also knows just how dear he doesn't hold human life – or mutant life either, however much he kids himself there. Everything is disposable, in service to the cause.

Erik is cruel and bitter and arrogant and cold. And he's also – when he lets himself, and sometimes when he doesn't – also kind and loyal and _funny_ and as fiercely loving as any mother wolf. Rogue doesn't want to know that. She don't want to know how it feels to relish the dying light in an enemy's eyes. How it feels to watch your family's ashes blow away and swear to yourself _never again._

They've been reading _Ender's Game_ in class. "I think it’s impossible," it says in the book, "to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them like they love themselves." Erik Lehnsherr is the last person on Earth Rogue wants to love.

Professor Xavier's been helping her, of course. He could probably take all the memories away, all those pockets of personality, just cut them out completely. She thinks maybe he has taken a few things; for instance, the whole Holocaust is just sort of a blurry nightmare. But he's been focusing on teaching her how to control it for herself, compartmentalize, keep her own personality on top.

"It will be much more useful to you in the long run," he says, pinning her with kind-but-sharp blue eyes, "to win control of your own power, than to depend on outside sources. I won't always be here to help you, after all."

Today, they have an appointment for 4:00, but when she walks into his office, he's not waiting behind the desk. She hears his voice, and glances into the next room; he's on the telephone. He smiles apologetically.

_One moment, Marie,_ comes the now-familiar mental voice. _Make yourself comfortable._

And all right, she's a little nosy. She's letting this man dig around in her brain; the least he can expect is her digging around in his office.

(And if _that's_ a little bit of Logan leaking out, oh well, she ain't bothered.)

So she looks around the office, running gloved fingertips over books and knick-knacks, plants on the windowsill. Picture frames on a little hutch against the hall. There's a ton of pictures there, mostly people she don't recognize, but there's Mr. Summers, and Beast, and – huh, that looks a lot like Theresa Cassidy's picture of her dad.

She opens a drawer and finds more pictures, not in frames, layered like fallen leaves. She doesn't know what drives her fingers straight down to one in particular, buried deep in a far corner.

(Yes she does.)

It's a very old photograph, its colors soft and faded. Two young men, smiling and relaxed, and she knows exactly who they are, even though Charles Xavier has a full head of thick brown hair, even though he's unrecognizably young and happy and playful and – starry-eyed, that's what her mom would say, with his head tipped back to take a kiss. From Erik Lehnsherr.

She could never have recognized Erik, not through sunglasses and a goofy old-fashioned hat, and definitely not through the smile leaking around the kiss, tender and amused and sort of disbelieving. She would never have known him. But he knows himself.

_Barely,_ breathes the unwelcome ghost. _Only barely._

"That hat," Professor Xavier chuckles, and Rogue jumps, guiltily dropping the photo back into the drawer – but the Professor doesn't seem annoyed, or surprised, at catching her with it. "He always had a flair for headwear. Or _he_ thought so." He brings his wheelchair to a stop in front of her usual chair. "I am sorry to have kept you waiting. Shall we get started?"

"Yeah," she says after a moment. And that's it. They don't talk about the photo, then or later.

But Rogue's struggles aren't quite as disconcerting, or as lonely, after that. Once she knows that the Professor – and more than that, her uninvited guest himself – they, too, know what it's like, to love the last person on Earth that they should.


End file.
